VAMPIRE

A Shahed killer that bolts onto a pickup truck — VAMPIRE is L3Harris's answer to the cheap-drone problem: a four-round launcher of laser-guided 70mm rockets plus a sensor mast that drops into any vehicle's cargo bed, knocking down attack drones for roughly $25,000 a shot instead of the six- or seven-figure missiles that used to do the job. Fielded in Ukraine from late 2023 on Humvees and improvised gunboats, it scored its first Shahed kill that December, spawned a whole family of variants by 2025, and in 2026 won its first big US-forces order — proof that the interceptor economy runs on cost per kill, not exquisite performance.

Overview

VAMPIRE — the Vehicle-Agnostic Modular Palletized ISR Rocket Equipment — is exactly what its acronym describes: a self-contained kit, not a purpose-built vehicle. A four-round launcher for BAE Systems APKWS laser-guided 70mm rockets, a WESCAM MX-10 electro-optical/infrared sensor on a telescoping mast, a weapons station and mission software, all palletized to bolt onto "most vehicles with a cargo bed" — in Ukraine, Humvees and even patrol boats. Its job is counter-UAS: killing the Shahed-class one-way attack drones that would otherwise force Ukraine to burn Patriot and S-300 rounds worth a hundred times more. The economics are the entire point — an APKWS round with an L3Harris proximity fuze costs about $20,000–30,000, against the $150,000-and-up interceptors it replaces at the low end of the threat. L3Harris field-tested VAMPIRE from 2021 and it entered the war under a $40 million, 14-system US contract in January 2023 (not the $1.2 billion figure sometimes cited — that conflates the separate $1.7 billion Navy APKWS production line); all 14 reached Ukraine by the end of 2023, and the first combat kill — a Shahed-136 downed by the Ukrainian Navy — came that December. By late 2025 L3Harris had unveiled an entire VAMPIRE family (containerized, naval, airborne, EW-only) and claimed users had shot down "hundreds" of drones; in June 2026 the US Army ordered up to $106 million worth, its first major domestic buy. One disambiguation the entry insists on: Ukraine separately nicknames its own heavy Baba Yaga bomber drone "Vampire" — no relation to this system.

Development

L3Harris built VAMPIRE on its own money, field-testing from 2021 as a low-cost counter-drone answer as the war began, per Defense News. It was selected in the Pentagon's Ukraine Security Assistance Initiative in August 2022, and on 6 January 2023 the DoD placed a $40 million order for 14 kits on government-furnished vehicles — four to be delivered by mid-2023, ten by year's end, per L3Harris. All 14 Humvee-mounted systems were delivered on schedule and in Ukraine by the end of December 2023, per TWZ, with the first confirmed combat kill — a Shahed-136 dropped by a Ukrainian Navy crew — released on video that same month, followed by another over the Odesa region in February 2024. Ukraine then improvised beyond the design brief: a ship-mounted VAMPIRE on a former Estonian patrol boat was OSINT-credited with intercepting a Russian Kh-59 cruise missile near Pivdennyi port in January 2025. L3Harris responded by productizing the improvisation — in October 2025 it unveiled the full VAMPIRE family (see Variants) alongside a claimed production capacity of 20–40 systems a month and a statement that VAMPIRE users had "successfully shot down hundreds of enemy drones," per TWZ — a manufacturer figure Ukraine's forces have never officially totaled. A June 2025 DoD order added undisclosed systems "in support of European operations"; a $106 million US Army order in June 2026 made the Army the first confirmed non-Ukrainian customer, with a high-volume line opening in Huntsville, Alabama and L3Harris claiming over 350,000 operational hours in European combat since 2023.

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